The Polish Nobility’s “Golden Freedom”: On the Ancient Roots of a Political Idea

Abstract

This essay traces the Greek and Roman roots of Polish sixteenth-to eighteenth-century political thought by discussing the Polish nobility's concept of the "Golden Freedom" (L. aurea libertas). By focusing on the Roman and the Greek concepts of liberty and the mixed constitution, it argues that the Golden Freedom, a notion central to the Polish-Lithuanian nobility's self-identification, was based on Roman political ideals and practices that were incompatible with the political reality of the Commonwealth. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is usually associated with the practice of liberum veto (in Polish Nie pozwalam!) and the "Sarmatian" dispute rather than with the rich range of its political thought. Established by the Union of Lublin in 1569, the Commonwealth enjoyed a Golden Age in the early seventeenth century and was then virtually annihilated by the Third Partition of Poland in 1795. Yet the Commonwealth survived as a political entity for over two centuries despite the political and social changes that beset it. 1 Within this period, there emerged a set of political values of the enfranchised nobility that has bequeathed to us a considerable number of sources, including political and moral writings, which are not studied or discussed as often as the political practice of this period. The aim of this essay is first to analyze how the pivotal ideal of the Golden Freedom invoked its Roman republican roots and then to clarify how this ideal differed from both the Roman and the Greek concepts of freedom, a point that is only cursorily treated in the history of ideas. The Polish culture of the Commonwealth, often referred to as "Sarmatism" (or "Sarmatianism"), the word used by the nobility to describe themselves as the descendants of the ancient Sarmatians, is probably best known from Jan Chryzostom Pasek's diaries (c. 1636-1701) and Wacław Potocki's poetry (c. 1621-96). The nobility's socio-political identity thus developed from the peculiar myth of origins referring to the belligerent tribe that throughout antiquity inhabited southwestern Asia and parts of the Balkans (ancient Scythia). Situated on the dividing line of East and West, this